I always had trouble reading makefiles because the control flow is not very linear. At least with shell files basically everything is explicit.

The dependency graph is one of the better reasons to use makefiles--think of the nonlinearity as a bonus!

I often find the non linear way of working with Make an advantage. Since it allows you to break a big piece of procedural shell code with lots of control flow (if X is installed don't install again, etc) into small self contained functional pieces with clean input and output boundaries which can be run individually. It also greatly improves code reuse as every target/recipe can be considered a function.

> Since it allows you to break a big piece of procedural shell code with lots of control flow (if X is installed don't install again, etc) into small self contained functional pieces with clean input and output boundaries which can be run individually

At that point, I use a scripting -not shell- language (which is not as implicit)

I don't program in c anymore, so my major workflow is all in one language; I write my server in the same language that do s the compilation, which is in the same language that does utilities like creating network tunnels to my lab nodes